Let’s say you have your own business and you launched a company website. You have two tasks: drive as much traffic to your site as possible and increase brand awareness. You probably know about such a popular tool as search engine optimization (SEO). Also, you should know that having good links back to your site is one of the three most important factors that affect your search engine rankings.

This means you need to get as many links to your site as possible. Given the industry in which your company operates, developing and implementing a link promotion strategy can be a daunting task, especially if you are a small or medium-sized business. After all, your competitors may be large corporations with virtually unlimited financial and human resources. It may not even be the size of your competitors, but the fact that they have found effective ways to generate a large number of links. And you may be tempted to get as many links as possible, no matter where or how you find them.

However, not all links work the same. Focusing only on the quantity and neglecting quality can seriously harm your business. Therefore, first and foremost, focus on building quality link building. We decided to share some helpful tips for building a link portfolio to effectively promote your business.

HOW TO CREATE QUALITY CONTENT TO GET BACKLINKS

The higher the quality of the content on your site, the more likely you are to receive organic links rather than artificial backlinks.

Small and medium-sized businesses that do not have enough time and resources to develop high-quality content can outsource its creation. Although the services of freelance writers are not cheap (from $ 45 per hour and even more), by contacting professionals in their field, you will receive quality content as soon as possible.

1. DEVELOP RELEVANT CONTENT

When creating content, think about how long it will remain relevant. If your content is focused on solving a problem that can quickly disappear from the visibility of your audience, it will have a very limited effect on the link-building process. Therefore, always consider such a feature as the relevance of the content you create.

Don’t let your posted content go out of date. Try to make your published content so that you can easily make changes to ensure that it is up to date. The ability to update your content underlines your expertise. Moreover, it is the simplest way to develop new content with minimal time and money.

Try to check your published content more often. Is it still relevant and valuable? And also timely restore or replace links that stopped working.

2. BECOME AN EXPERT IN THE FIELD IN WHICH YOUR BUSINESS OPERATES

People often cite expert opinions. By publishing quality, authoritative, well-structured content, you will position yourself as an expert in the field in which your company operates. It will motivate other authors to create more organic links to your content. Moreover, you will be able to insert quotes into various materials published on other sites, thereby gaining even more opportunities for creating backlinks.

Building relationships is also a testament to your competence in a particular area. By working with reporters and representatives of organizations working in your industry, you will strengthen your status. If they need a source for a citation, they will most likely turn to you.

Maintain your good reputation by using an effective backlink-building strategy by controlling who is linking to your content. If you receive links from less reputable sources or spammy sites, the effect will be the opposite.

3. EMBED IMAGES, ANIMATIONS, AND VIDEOS INTO YOUR CONTENT

The average Internet user is unable to keep his attention on this or that object for too long, and the so-called “user’s attention time” is decreasing every year. Therefore, the content you create should grab attention. You will achieve this effect by diluting the text content with visual objects (pictures, animation, video).

If your content contains infographics, images, and videos, the likelihood of a user following a backlink following your prompts is significantly higher than if there was only text in front of him. Beautiful and high-quality images attract the attention of users, making it possible to quickly evaluate the content of a text article. Choose your visuals responsibly. For example, stock images have much less impact than unique images that are directly related to published material.

Undoubtedly, you want those who link to your content to indicate the source of the information correctly. Do not neglect this rule when using images or videos obtained from third-party sources.

4. REUSE YOUR CONTENT

Regardless of the way you create content, you have invested certain resources in it, namely: spent time and effort on research, writing text, creating graphic elements. Use resources as efficiently as possible by repurposing content that has already been created. You will spend far less time and money making changes to use the content for other purposes than creating new original material.

There are many ways to reuse already published content. For example, you have done the research and obtained data that you did not use in any material. They come in handy for new content. Find a different approach to the problem, building on the materials already created. Use the images already published on the site for posting on social networks.

However, content reuse is not simply about copying the same content for posting on different platforms. You still need to create unique, high-quality content that doesn’t duplicate existing content verbatim. However, by building on the work you’ve already done, you can create new content much faster and more cost-effectively.

SEO STILL PLAYS AN IMPORTANT ROLE

The better you understand the principles of search engine promotion, the more effective your job of generating backlinks will be. Most of the search results will forever remain out of sight of Internet users, therefore, if you are not included in the TOP-3 search results, the probability of going to a page on your site is extremely low. However, if you are in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place in the SERPs, your chances of success increase dramatically. So, the probability of clicking on links located in the search results in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places are distributed as follows: 30%, 15%, and 10%, respectively.

Also read: Intent and SEO: a Quick Guide 2021 | DigitalGrowthWorld

Key phrases used correctly are still one of the key factors to consider when ranking. By increasing your site’s page rank by using high-frequency keywords, you increase the likelihood that users will link to your content.

While this is not directly related to link building, you must ensure that your site is protected from hacking. The security of an Internet resource plays an important role for any company seeking to maintain its reputation and expand its audience. Modern hackers exploit vulnerabilities in SEO strategies for subsequent attacks. Therefore, as your campaign to increase the number of backlinks expands, remain vigilant to prevent attackers from using your resources to their advantage.

Building an effective backlink generation strategy isn’t just about getting links from any source. You have to think carefully and plan everything, spend time and money on creating quality content that people will want to cite and link to. Every company’s investment in developing high-quality content is sure to pay off.

SEO promotion of Internet projects continues to develop at a rapid pace, introducing new optimization strategies. Even if SEO specialists don’t offer something completely new, they are improving the old methods that still work. In this article, we will highlight 8 search engine optimization trends that are having a significant impact on the development of the SEO industry.

1. Voice Searches Are Gaining Momentum

Did you know that voice search accounted for about 48% of all searches in 2019? And the percentage of voice queries to text queries is constantly increasing. To improve the relevance of search results for voice queries, Google has invested in projects such as BERT, RankBrain, and Knowledge. RankBrain and BERT technologies are designed to improve search engine “understanding” of voice queries. As for the Knowledge Graph, this online service is necessary for establishing relationships between various entities, such as objects, geolocations, and others. The question is, how can you leverage this trend in search engine optimization to benefit your online project?

First, you must understand that you will not be able to directly optimize your site for the above new Google technologies. However, you can optimize it for voice searches. Here are some tips to help you with this:

• sign up for Google My Business if you don’t have an active account yet;
• optimize the loading speed of website pages;
• get as many backlinks as possible (link building);
• add site schema markup;
• provide answers to frequently asked questions;

Try to keep your answers short as the average length of a voice query is 29 words.

Use Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to find out exactly what questions people are asking through a voice search tool. Having analyzed the queries of an interrogative nature, you optimize the content of your site specifically for voice queries.

2. Image Search Will Be In High Demand

As you know, images play an important role in search engine optimization. By using optimized images, you will be able to drive more traffic to your website. Surprisingly, this already pretty old SEO tool is still relevant, as the number of image searches is constantly increasing.

So how do you optimize your SEO for image queries? To begin with, the basic image-based promotion strategies haven’t changed significantly. However, SEO using images opens up even more possibilities for the webmaster, as the number of searches has increased significantly (especially with the use of Google Lens, a technology that allows you to search using a smartphone camera). For example, if a potential customer points the device’s camera at a product, they will have access to detailed information about it.

In addition, Google uses images of products posted on websites to find information about them. For example, if you enter the search term “baseball cap with horns,” the search results will display mostly images from online retailers. By using image optimization strategies such as adding alt tags, correct image file names, and product markup schemes, you will increase your chances of hitting the top positions in search results for queries related to your niche.

3. Search Intent Continues To Play An Important Role In Queries

The search target is the real reason for looking for this or that information. To explain this term better, here are some examples. Let’s say you entered the query “digital marketing institute in Varanasi“ into a Google search box. This request has an educational search purpose. If the query looked like “buy a piano,” then the target would be purchasing. However, if the user enters the query “map generator”, it will be difficult to determine the search target, since this query does not contain a keyword that clearly indicates the search target.

On the one hand, such a query can serve a learning purpose, as some people want to know how the map generator works. On the other hand, there are people interested in purchasing this tool. Either way, search target plays an important role in SEO. To follow this trend in search engine optimization, you must create quality content that fully matches your search goals. Figure out how to optimize your existing content for a specific search goal. To do this, analyze the search results and pay attention to what type of content the search engine ranks for certain queries. Draw conclusions and create content based on them.

4. The Number Of Requests With Zero Clicks Is Constantly Increasing

Zero click searches have both positive and negative characteristics. The positive side is that people can receive instant information in the form of a piece of text. Therefore, there is no need to navigate to a particular page. The negative aspect of zero-click queries is that they do not increase website traffic. It is noteworthy that the number of such requests will gradually increase. This is due to the desire of Google and Yandex to provide the simplest and most comfortable search for information on the Internet. This is why popular search engines are gradually increasing the efficiency of search engine algorithms aimed at extracting the required pieces of content from the pages of sites and displaying them directly on the page with search results.

What are the prospects for using this trend in SEO strategies? You will not be able to influence the fact that the number of requests with zero clicks will continue to grow. However, we do have an effective keyword tip that you should avoid when optimizing the content you publish on your site. In simple terms: don’t waste your time on keywords that don’t generate clicks. For example, if Google highlights a piece of content for a specific keyword, it won’t do you any good. However, this is only true if the snippet fully responds to the user’s request. If the fragment of text highlighted by Google and Yandex gives only a partial answer, and for more information, you need to visit your site, then such a keyword is of some benefit.

5. Mobile Compatibility Will Become Critical

Google began using mobile compatibility as a key ranking factor back in 2015. In 2019, Google began to prioritize mobile-optimized sites. Statistics show that at the beginning of 2021, 70% of indexed sites use a mobile-first approach.

How to capitalize on this trend in SEO? First of all, make sure that your site has switched to mobile indexing. You can find out using the Search Console tool. Go to the Settings section and see the Indexing Crawler report. If the “Google Smartphone” indicator is displayed, then your site is configured for mobile indexing.

If your site uses a responsive design, you can easily enable mobile indexing. However, if it has a complex structure or was specially designed for mobile devices (an additional version of the site with a dedicated subdomain), then you need to check if there are any differences between the main and mobile versions. Also, check your robots.txt file for alternate rules, site navigation, page load speed, and internal linking.

6. Good Ux Will Be A Top Priority

Google only ranks pages with user satisfaction content. The search engine uses certain metrics to assess how well the site and the displayed content match the user’s request. These metrics include the following: the presence of SSL encryption (HTTPS protocol), compatibility with mobile devices and the convenience of viewing content on small displays, the absence of intrusive ads. An additional metric, more recently, is Core Web Vitals, a set of three metrics that measure user experience. These indicators include:

• The delay at the first data entry is the response time of the site page to the first interaction with it. On average, this should be around 100ms.
• Cumulative Layout Shift – How often an unexpected layout shift occurs (no more than 0.1 times).

The largest amount of content (what part of the main content of the page is displayed on the device screen).
You can use the PageSpeed ​​Insights tool to check the values ​​of these parameters for any page on your site.

Review the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console to find out which pages need optimization.

7. Traffic Growth Thanks To Google Discover

Google Discover is a personalized mobile feed that displays the content of interest to the user. It is populated with information taken from Google services such as search results and YouTube. In addition, Google Discover takes into account the location data and topics that the user is interested in.

This trend in SEO is of some benefit to web project owners, as Google Discover is capable of generating large amounts of traffic. Especially if you’ve done quality search engine optimization on your site to get traffic directly from Google’s SERPs. You’ve spent a lot of time and effort implementing on-page and off-page search engine optimization strategies, developing optimized content, writing attractive page titles, and link building. However, you can improve the effectiveness of your website promotion campaign with a few tips for using Google Discover:

• adhere to Google’s guidelines for using the Google Discover service;
• make sure that mobile indexing is enabled for your site;
• check the loading speed of the website pages;
• create attractive page titles;
• publish high-quality and relevant content;
• use optimized images;
• adhere to the EAT principles.

8. Compliance With Eat Principles Will Become A Necessity

EAT is an abbreviation formed by three English-language words. sound like “expertise”, “authority” and “reliability”. Please note that EAT is not a ranking factor. However, Google reviews sites against these guidelines in three steps:

• evaluation of search results by experts on the quality of search;
• providing feedback to identify signals consistent with the EAT principles;
• making appropriate changes to Google search algorithms.

To ensure your site is in compliance with the EAT guidelines, follow these steps:

• update content regularly;
• check the published content for the accuracy of the information contained in it;
• cover topics that you know 100% of;
• try to get as many views as possible;
• generate as many backlinks and mentions as possible.

CONCLUSIONS

Always keep up with the latest trends in the world of CEOs. As this industry is growing at a rapid pace, you run the risk of missing important changes and being left behind by your competitors. Follow the above 8 trends to stay high on the SERP.

Marketing is an integral part of any business development strategy. It plays an important role in increasing brand awareness, attracting customers, increasing sales, and scaling the business in general. Through marketing campaigns, people learn about the products on offer and the role they can play in their lives.

In fact, marketing turns a business into a two-way street by attracting leads. Thanks to marketing, companies create a solid foundation for their business, adapt all its key aspects, and enter into a dialogue with consumers. It also includes effective strategies for interacting with your audience to build a positive reputation over a period of time.

Every company strives to optimize its marketing strategies to make them simple and affordable. However, many business owners are looking for simpler routes and opt for fast advertising, which is quite expensive. Instead, you can use the more creative approach suggested in 11 Tips for Business Growth.

1. LAUNCHING THE TRIAL VERSION (BETA VERSION)

This technique is used by many companies. Before launching a finished product, they release a beta version to the market. As odd as it sounds, the trial version can stimulate increased demand for a product or service. After receiving the beta version, the consumer will be able to evaluate the main characteristics of the product. Use the beta to build your primary user base, and then develop a marketing strategy to promote the finished product. Since many people will be interested in the product and want to try it, you will create an atmosphere of exclusivity in what you have to offer.

Every beta test participant will feel like an “insider” who was one of the first to gain access to the product. By doing everything right, you will build a loyal audience thanks to the so-called word of mouth long before the launch of the finished product. You can use Product Hunt and other online services to launch a beta version of a product.

2. FORUMS

The simplest way to build a loyal audience is through marketing forums to promote your business. On the forums, you can interact with representatives of other companies, including those in your industry, as well as with marketing professionals. The more often you communicate with business representatives, the more useful experience you can learn and use for the organic development of your company.

By applying an effective marketing strategy, you will be able to participate in various discussions on forums, share your knowledge and experience, and attract the attention of stakeholders. If you do it right, you will get an audience that will remain loyal to you for a long time.

3. PLATFORMS FOR POSTING CONTENT

If you want information about your product to reach a wide audience, post it in reputable publications. Try to keep abreast of all current trends and draw up detailed reports for their subsequent publication in advertising publications. Cover topics such as public relations, branding, career opportunities, digital marketing, key events in your industry, case studies, business strategy guides. To make your product marketable and popular among the elite industrialists, highlight its value in editorials, newsletters, and other publications.

4. POSITION YOURSELF AS A USER OF YOUR OWN PRODUCTS

People trust real actions more than simple words. No matter how loudly you advertise your product, the real effect will only be achieved when you show how you use it by your own example. Become the main user ambassador for what you have to offer. By doing this, you will not only set an example for others, but you will become better aware of all the advantages and disadvantages of your product, which will help you make the necessary changes.

5. USE REFERRAL PROGRAMS

One of the simplest and most affordable marketing strategies is still word of mouth, which works with repeat customers. About 78% of B2B businesses use this social media marketing trick to maximize their results. Referrals can be experienced users of your product, spreading information about it through their relatives and friends, thereby helping you to expand your customer base. You can reward referrals by offering them a reward for each new customer. To use this trust marketing technique as efficiently as possible, we recommend using special referral platforms such as GrowSurf and others.

6. RUN CONTESTS AND EVENTS

One of the best ways to build brand awareness and build an engaging audience is to run contests that prize your products. Through competitions, companies research the market and study their competitors. Run contests around a variety of holidays and events such as Valentine’s Day, Organ Donation Day, and others that match your niche. In addition, conduct direct surveys to get information about the preferences of your target audience. As a result of the competition, play out several variants of prizes to choose from.

Also Read:  Keyword Research: A Guide for 2021

One of the most effective options for the competition is a quiz that combines simple and difficult questions. So you will attract the audience to your brand, interest in its various aspects. Another good option is a social media contest, during which participants must upload their photos with your product. So you can get more information about your customers, attract even more new users through social networks.

7. PLAY CASH PRIZES

Perhaps there is no better incentive to attract an audience than real money. Offer your customers cash rewards for every new user they refer. Your clients can do it in any way: from registering on your website and downloading a mobile application to publishing an opinion about your company on social networks. By starting to reward users for these simple actions that help promote your business, you will contribute to the formation of interest in your company and its products. This marketing technique is characterized by high-performance indicators at low financial costs.

8. FORM A NETWORK OF LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE

Build a community of interested people from a variety of industries by hosting meetings, conferences, exhibitions, and public events. So, you can find potential customers and investors to whom you can present the product, talk about its prospects, as well as plan for further brand promotion. Using this marketing technique, you will not only establish contact with potential clients but also be able to use the services of developers, designers, accountants, content marketing specialists who will help you in the further development of your business.

9. PUBLIC PAMPHLETS

Another great way to increase your brand awareness is by distributing brochures, brochures, badges, and stickers. Study your audience and design flyers with 4 important principles: attention, interest, desire, and action. Add elements to motivate potential customers to take the targeted action by artificially creating a sense of urgency. Provide an easy way to interact with your company through a website or a convenient mobile application.

To correctly implement this strategy, use the services of a professional copywriter, designer, and distributor. To improve the effectiveness of this technique, try to convince the recipients of the flyer that signing up for your product does not pose any risks by providing a money-back guarantee. The more effectively you distribute these flyers, the better the response from the audience will be. Also, to make your product more memorable, place promotional images on displays, billboards, and walls.

10. RUN SOCIAL CAMPAIGNS

Various social campaigns (informing about the availability of donor services, helping starving children, preventing pollutants from entering drinking water, etc.) will help attract attention to your brand from well-meaning customers. By associating yourself with one or another socially oriented activity, you will position yourself as a socially responsible company. In addition, you will enlist the support of ordinary people. During events, hand out T-shirts with your brand logo or flyers with information about how your business relates to the event. This will build an audience that you can later convert into customers.

11. VIRAL VIDEOS

The number of users of social platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter is increasing every day. Creating interesting videos is one of the most effective marketing techniques. About 81% of companies use video marketing tools to create a visually compelling image of their product, as well as explain its key properties. Fill your videos with humor and use artistic exaggeration to spread them to a wider audience. If your video goes viral, your brand will be talked about in all social circles. A viral video created by Intel is a good example.

CONCLUSIONS

Marketing goes far beyond using paid advertising. Use the strategy to promote your brand and increase its awareness using the techniques described above and your business will start to grow at a rapid pace.